Chapter 8: Caught a glimpse of a normal life. Terrified by the sight

August 14th, 2020, San Luis Obispo, California - Earth

“Charlie Finnigan, you made your mother proud reading the whole thing.” Grace was checking him over. Brushing some flint along his jacket, pushing his shirt down and pulling up his belt and pants to help with the sag. A few days had passed since he had wet himself while grading.

He had sent out an e-mail stating he intended to resign. This had been more of an exit interview. Today he even looked like his old self, blue overcoat, khakis, nice shirt. His mother would dress him up like an adult when taking him in public. She bought him new clothes at JC Penny's. She had to go to nicer places online for the special underwear. The thick ones with boy friendly designs, not the ugly medical stuff. You could hardly tell he was wearing protection. Grace had gotten some experience with handling diapers and knew how best to hide them.

“I liked that they kept using my old name. I don't think they liked what I read. It was hard getting through it all mommy.”

“Well, yes, but you can see the logic of it, right? Why we had to change it?” The younger lady questioned him.

He did not. She had mentioned that last names were important, it said who your father was, it was the first gift a dad gave to his daughter. If Charlie's daughter had the last name Finnigan, and she was not married, then surely his name would have to be Finnigan too, right?

It did not make sense to him, but mommy logic was like that sometimes. Like why he had to take baths instead of showers, or who got to drive his car. It was like science. Newtonian physics, relativity, and quantum physics did not go together either. A little boy's logic was just a special case for the general (mommy) logic.

“It's nice here, if I study and work hard can I come back?” Charles asked, unsure of what the future held.

Grace declined the request, “No, I don't think so, this is a place for people who aren't ready for the real world. It's for those people who never want to grow up and get a normal job. It's not good to be so focused on school all the time. There's family and work and other parts of life that matter more. I don't want you to worry anymore about academics or achievements or teaching. I want you to strive to be a bit more free range.”

It was hot outside. Mommy was not home much since she had moved in with him. She let him stay inside and just watch TV. He was also allowed to go for walks to the park by himself. Even spend the entire day reading if he wanted! The books she gave him had too many pictures though and were starting to bore him.

He felt like he wanted to be doing something important, but she said nothing he did before had been important, so why start now! From now on just being her little boy full-time was important enough for her. The most important job he would ever have. Just being there for his family.

The university was most accommodating to Ms. Finnigan. She hinted she may have gotten pregnant. Charles had all but admitted that with the speech he read. He said he needed to spend more time with his daughter, but his ex-wife only had a son, right? Either way, Ms. Finnigan said she would need to take time away from her studies to raise her new child.

Doctor Short had said she was brilliant, even if his reputation was not that great at the end. Grace had practically memorized the first chapter on nuclear physics, she was that kind of whiz, she did not really need school except for the diploma.

The new head of the department, Candace Draper, was more than happy to help move some paperwork around. In fact, she had a new paradigm that she wanted to try. Only those who needed to be in school would be there. Focus on the students where teaching could actually make a difference. There were too many children who were not ready for school and who could not learn anything, but also, they needed to stay away from those too big for it and didn't need to be there. Something in between.

Too bad there is no word for that, adults who still needed to be treated like children.

Some, like Grace Finnigan, were just more mature than the other students. It was possible to be too grown up for school. They really should not be teaching those kinds of students.

Under this new regime, the school was more than willing to give a few exceptions around gen ed and prerequisites, test her out of some other classes, and pair things down to just a few remote courses to earn her diploma. Instead of settling with Grace for a quarter million-dollar lawsuit they would give her a quarter million-dollar degree on a silver platter. They did not explicitly say what this was a settlement, but she and Charles had been most cooperative in moving on from this, and the university was willing to work with her as long as she kept things quiet.

Grace had begun living with Charlie in his old house. He had to be moved into the guest room. She had let him design it however he wanted, and he went with a military theme. Perfect for any five-year-old boy. He had his GI Joes and a giant framed movie poster for Fury. His dresser was topped with a model of a B-29 bomber. His sheets had tanks. The furniture was adorned with swinging weights and balls and there was even a toy chest with a whole bucket of army men. He was sixty-six going on six. Or maybe three. Numbers were not that important to him these days.

A part of him hated it, he had been in school when Vietnam was closing up, and all his teachers the first time around had told him war was kind of a bad thing. Ever since he had met Grace, he had been on this weird World War Two bug. He would spend hours watching the H Channel when his mom wasn't home. Recreate naval battles at bath time. Go down the slide in the backyard like he was landing at Market Garden. Explosions were cool now.

Mommy had told him her boss had flown a B-52 in the last war, and he just thought her job had to be the coolest thing in the world. She would bring home peaches that tasted like peppermint, or bananas that tasted like real bananas. For over sixty years bananas tasted wrong, and this one tasted right, like when he was little the first time around.

They would sit for a while when she got home and he would talk about his adventures, and she would tell him about missions and spies and all sorts of fun boy stuff. And then she did her typical mom stuff from there, dinner, some shared television time, bath, jammies, and she would tuck him at … well when big hand on the clock pointed at twelve. She would read to him something short, she always liked Chicken Little, but he was getting bored of it. The sky cannot fall! The atmosphere is held in by gravity, not the other way around. He could probably read the whole book now without opening his eyes.

For some reason she trusted him to be home all day, but she just said that is what it meant to be a free-range kid. Some parents trusted their children more and gave them more responsibilities. She even told him that in some cultures two-year-olds would be trained to debone fish. Mommy would not let him cook yet, but she trusted him with peanut butter and jelly and toast, cereal, and milk and sometimes he would make her something too.

It was important to let children grow at their own pace and trust them. Potty was still hard, but he was grown up in other ways. Mommy let him sign the checks he got in the mail, and he would give them to the teller to deposit them directly into their shared bank account. She even let him have a debit card and sometimes he would go to the corner station and get some candy. Mommy did not care, as long as he got his exercise in and brushed his teeth he could have (1) candy bar and (1) mocha. No one ever commented on the fact he wore diapers under his clothing.

When he was on the edge of sleeping, when he was done for the night, and tucked in, teeth brushed, story read, and all the things a little boy needs, and mommy was done being a mommy, she would turn to him and hand him a book to read for her. It was his turn to practice reading.

Tonight was “Applied Regression Analysis.” Math! Yuck! He liked the science ones better as they had stories with characters like Mr. Lepton and Ms. Boson. Science books were fun because they involved coloring or explosions – stuff every boy could appreciate. Still, he would read anything she wanted. The math book was slow, and mommy had to help with some of the bigger words. It was like his old man said before he died. Daddy would not always be there, and Charlie would have to be the big man for mommy from time to time. That meant stepping up, helping around the house, and always putting his family's needs before his own.

Sure, he could not do the funny voices his daughter did when she was reading to him, (that was just a silly thing mommy did, everyone knows boys cannot do voices), but he tried to make the reading exciting in other ways. He always had some anecdote to make it a little more grounded. He would often fall asleep after reading a few pages, and Grace would set aside the book, turn off the lights, and go back to the master bedroom. After all she had work in the morning, and a responsible adult gets plenty of sleep.

When her mother found out she had 'dropped' out of school, that she had 'married' an old flame of hers, and even got her 'husband' to take her father's name, she had denounced her from the family forever. For Howard, he was just proud that his daughter had found a way to make both the needs of her career and her family work.

He had been upset at first, especially with Mira for lying to him for two decades. He wanted a divorce but now it did not seem to have any point. Grace had told Howard that he was always going to be her 'real dad' and she felt the name change was proof enough of her thoughts on the matter.

Then his daughter explained what was really bothering Howard was that he was living in an empty nest.

Wouldn't it be nice if there was someone small around the house? Another kid to make him not feel like such an old fuddy duddy?

He actually did want to go back and relive all the best parts of teaching Grace to grow up, and maybe this time get to have a say in how he raised his daughter and not just defer all the choices to mommy. Someone Charlie might even enjoy visiting and playing with. It would be hard to raise a child at his age, but Grace was born when he was young and there was still time to go again.

Of course, none of that had actually been what he originally had been thinking. Not at first.

He changed his mind after he got a call from Grandpa Finnigan (his dad). Somehow, he had missed the call, and his dad did the thing where he started talking to the voice mail, not realizing he was not talking to a person. Dad just kind of rambled for a bit, but then got serious. A voice mail was a weird way to experience such an intimate conversation, but the advice was good, and he saved the voice mail so he would listen to it over and over.

Nothing had actually changed; he just wanted a different relationship with Mira. He initially thought that meant divorce because what other option was there? Grandpa made it clear there was no reason to preference divorce over any other choices. The real problem was with Mira, not him. She defined her entire life around Grace's academic success, and Grace had rejected that. Mira had nothing else in her adult life that was as important. She had failed as an adult. Mira needed to take some time to slow things down, get a new perspective on life.

Grace had a great idea on how to help her appreciate all the parts of childhood her mom had missed. Grandma had raised her with hellish expectations, and she just never could live up to those. As a bonus he could get to experience all the joys again of having a young daughter in the house. It was a perfect solution.

Grace was always the clever one. She must have got that from him, after all her mother could not even handle potty training.